Category Archives: SEO Tips & Info

Apr 18

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A 1% increase in your site’s visitor-to-purchase ratio could mean thousands of dollars in increased profit. Here’s 5 tips to get you started on making your Ecommerce site convert more of your visitors into customers.

1. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices

Mobile is a big deal. By 2018, global mobile e-commerce revenues are projected to reach $669 billion — that’s 45% of the projected revenue for the entire e-commerce market. When you’re looking to increase traffic, mobile can be a good place to start. Leading search engines are experimenting with mobile-first indexing. You need to create more than just a responsive design or m.dot site. Make your site easy to navigate from start to finish and include an intuitive, frictionless checkout process. Optimize for touch screen when designing your call to action, product images and form fields, and don’t forget to A/B test different checkout form lengths to find the right balance for optimal conversion rates.

2. Help your customers find what they are looking for.

Customers will leave your site if product information is confusing or they can’t quickly locate what they came for. Visitors often enter a site through the home page or category page. A flat navigation, or condensing your hierarchy to 1-3 layers, combines some of your pages vertically so that it is easier for users to locate specific products in fewer clicks. With in-site search navigation, many buyers will look for generic phrases rather than product names to find information. Using generic phrases, (i.e. “Men’s shoes” or “smartphone cases”) rather than specific product names, gives them the opportunity to broaden their search and find what they want.

3. Acquire relevant traffic

Attracting buyers who don’t need your product won’t convert to sales. Low conversion can be the first indicator that you may be promoting content and messages in the wrong places, or to unintended recipients. Take a look at the search queries in your paid search account and discern whether you will benefit from adding negative keywords to relevant audiences. One common targeting error is selecting rich keywords or buzzwords that may relate to your overall product group, but are still too broad to appeal to your intended audience. Have a strong understanding of who your audience is before you optimize your site and keywords to help align your product more closely to the buyers who need it.

4. Improve your site speed

Longer loading times can significantly decrease your customer’s patience during the buying process. If these customers leave, you may have lost them forever, considering 28% of customers won’t return to a slow site. Search engines also penalize slow websites with lower search rankings. A few ways you could improve your site speed today include compressing your Javascript and CSS scripts, optimizing lossless or lossy images, limiting third-party advertising space and testing your site speed to ensure you are working with a quality web host.

5. Provide a Compelling Product Visual Experience

When it comes to product images, quality can lend credibility. 75% of eCommerce site users rank the ability to zoom in on product images as one of their top reasons to purchase. One image is rarely enough. Providing product visuals with various angles, including a full view and size comparison of the product, can deliver valuable context for your buyer. For example, if a customer is on your site reviewing backpacks, it could be helpful to showcase a person wearing the backpack. The customer will be able to visualize how the bag will look when held over their shoulder and that context can bring them closer to purchasing.

5 Tips for Improving Ecommerce Site Conversion Rates was last modified: October 14th, 2018 by William Gannon

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Aug 17

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What Exactly is a Content Delivery Network or CDN?

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network which is a network of edge servers that deliver cached static content from websites to users based on the geographic location of the user. CDN’s, are not a web hosting substitute. It is an additional network of servers for certain static file types only.

Normally, when someone visits your website, they are directed to your hosting provider’s server. Your server is located in 1 location. For example, JA Publications is hosted in Salt Lake City, Utah. If you’re not using a CDN, all of your website’s users are hitting this one server. If you have a site that gets lots of traffic, this can overload your server and cause the site to perform slowly and even crash the server.

User’s proximity to your web server has an impact on page load time. By deploying your content across multiple geographically dispersed servers, you can make your pages load faster from the user’s perspective. This is when a CDN comes in handy. In simpler words, the closer the CDN server is to where your user is, the faster the user gets the content. A good CDN, will have edge servers located all over the world and close to populated areas.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) Help Speed Up Your Site

Websites have static resources such as images, videos, and certain types of files like CSS and JavaScript. Content Delivery Networks host these static resources on what is called an edge server. An edge server is a network of servers located all over the world. The purpose of an edge server is to host your website’s static resources so when your visitors hit your site, these static files load faster. The way it works has to do with internet latency and the number of hops or round trips that is required to render the page. When you use a CDN, you reduce the number of hops and the latency, which speeds up the rendering process.

Content Delivery Networks & SEO

Page speed is a ranking factor by most search engines. If your site is performing poorly, this usually hurts your ranking meaning that if two sites are tied for first place, the faster site wins. When you’re setting up a CDN, make sure you use a properly configured robots.txt in your pull zone to avoid duplicate content penalties. Also, specifying the origin IP address is not a bad idea either along with using SSL. I recommend MaxCDN. They have great customer support and very fast edge servers. How to setup the actual zone or CDN for SEO is beyond the scope of this post.

How Content Delivery Networks Help Your SEO was last modified: October 1st, 2018 by Jeff

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Apr 16

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If the Meta keyword tags were really important ingredients in your recipe for SEO success, Google, Yahoo, and Bing would be the first ones to let you know that you actually need them. They would try to convince you to include them inside your header and would highlight the main benefits associated with this practice. Nonetheless, in reality, Google and Yahoo have chosen to ignore Meta keyword tags. Reason: in the past 10 years, numerous webmasters have SPAMMED out and abused the meta keywords tag. What commonly happens is people with less than a thorough understanding of the way search algorithms work will put every variation of their business type in keyword form in the keywords meta tag.

Here’s an example of how webmasters spam the meta keywords tag:

Phasing Out the Meta Keywords Tag

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how spammy this Black Hat SEO technique is, and this is why major search engines like Google.com and Yahoo ignore the meta keywords tag.That still doesn’t detour webmasters and SEO amateurs from doing it though, and even today, many still are. JA Publications, Inc. does a lot of Google penalty removal services, so we see this in the course of our analysis more often than we should. Second to back link schemes, this is the most common penalizing SEO technique that we see. Keyword stuffing not only meta tags but page content and meta titles and descriptions is also common.

Since keyword Meta tags have been used in conjunction with shady website optimization tactics, most search engines have decided to ignore them and the meta keywords tag holds no SEO weight or power. Bing seems to be even more determined, and goes the extra mile to penalize website owners who count on this type of black hat SEO strategy. Bing interprets the Meta keywords tag like a spam signal. Websites that use the tag, but do not display the keywords included with it, in their page body copy, are penalized by Bing. We like that a lot! The less SPAM, the better as far as we’re concerned.

Here’s 5 hot SEO tips for boosting your website’s organic traffic.

Organic traffic is the best kind of traffic you can receive because it’s relevant and targeted. However, it can be difficult to get higher page rankings, especially if you aren’t using the right SEO strategies.

1. It All Starts with Engaging Content

The first thing you need is a targeted buyer persona. It’s a fictitious outline of who your customers are.

Ask yourself these questions:

Who am I targeting?

What problems can I help them solve?

What external events influences their decision?

How can I change what they are currently doing?

Next, you want to head over to a site called Buzzsumo.com to search for topics that generates the most social shares. This allows you to get a better idea on the types of subjects to write about.

2. Monitor Your Website for Bad Links

You must monitor your website for bad links. Third party websites will oftentimes link to your site and those links could be hurting your page rankings. Therefore, you must monitor your site for bad, low quality links and remove them. The characteristics of good links are as follows:

3. Disavow Bad Links

After you’ve identified the good links from the bad ones, you will need to tag the links that are bad, then begin trying to remove them by contacting the website the link belongs to and ask them to remove it. If you can’t contact them or they refuse to remove the link, you can create a disavow report and submit it using the Google Disavow Tool to help prevent those links from hurting your site. The way the disavow tool works is a bit elusive and outside the scope of this article. Therefore, you should take some time to learn more about how it works so you will know what to do and what not to do.

4. Promote Your Content with Text Messaging

Most people have at least one type of mobile device and prefer a text to any other type of communication, which is why text marketing is so effective. Because about 90 percent of all texts are opened within a few minutes of them being received.

Before you can send a text message to promote your new content, you’ll need to build your mobile list.

Place a mobile optin-form on your website so your readers can subscribe to it. You can even segment the list by topics and user behavior. Through this form you can collect their email address and mobile phone number.

Once your content goes live, you can use a texting services to send relevant messages straight to their mobile phone to increase traffic to your website. With proper social sharing tools embedded within your article, you can expect lots of social shares and continual organic traffic.

5. Earn Quality Back links

Another great link building technique is earning your back links through guest posting on other industry related blogs and linking your article back to a related page on your website. You simply need to contact webmasters of related blogs and websites and ask them if they would allow you to post an article on their site in exchange for a link back to yours. Most of the time webmasters are more than happy to comply as long as your site is related and not a direct competitor because it’s less content they have to write.

If you would like more information about boosting your organic traffic using SEO and other internet marketing strategies, please contact us and let us show you how we can help take your website to the next level.

Author Biography

Sophorn Chhay

Sophorn is the marketing guy at Trumpia, the most complete SMS software with mass sms messaging, smart targeting and automation. Jumpstart your business by grabbing your free copy of his powerful Mobile Marketing Success Kit. Watch Trumpia’s 5-Minute Demo on how to execute an effective mobile marketing strategy.

Sep 15

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What Exactly Are Back Links and What Do They Have to do with SEO?

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also known as Inbound links. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query. Be careful though and don’t ever purchase back links and block the address of anyone claiming to sell them. If you own a business and you have money invested in your website, and then you buy a link package ( that’s really just a link farm ), you could spend another additional year cleaning up this profile after it negatively affects your site’s position in search. These types of backlinks do not benefit SEO and can do the opposite and penalize the site more than if it had zero backlinks. Most of the time, zero backlinks is better than 500 from a link farm.

Backlinks Are Important, But …

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of good quality inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with getting any inbound links, and must always keep in mind that it is the quality of the link that is what really matters. Most major search engines consider the content of the sites (that link to yours) to determine the relevancy and the quality of a backlink. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have similar content to your site, they are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated or irrelevant content, they are considered less quality. The higher the relevance of your inbound links as far as your site, the greater their quality will be and vice versa.

Search engines prefer websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over a period of time. Links on directory sites do little to nothing for your position in search. If you do notice a change after buying a premium directory liting, it’s most likely unrelated. Search engines are much smarter than that now.

Back Links for SEO Going into 2016

Expect Google to get even tougher as far as the criteria for what they consider “quality inbound links” going into 2016. Thanks to webmasters trying to achieve ranking by deceptive Black Hat or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and the links from these sites are ignored by most major search engines and have little to no ranking power. Yet, linking to a link farm could get your site penalized and removed from the first page. Trying to manipulate search engine rankings with backlinks is a waste of time and money at best, and potentially damaging to your SEO at worst. I wouldn’t bother trying.

Why Are Backlinks Important for SEO? was last modified: October 14th, 2018 by Jeff